• Duane Hall/Chicago Sun-Times
  • Women at Daley Plaza during the Women’s Strike on August 26, 1970.

Mary Jean Collins moved to Chicago in 1968 and immediately joined the local chapter of the National Organization for Women. “Everything was happening,” she said in a recent phone conversation. “Everything was exploding. It was so much fun to be on the ground floor and starting an organization that was attacking everything.”

Dore hopes that when She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry opens at the Music Box tomorrow, Chicagoans will know who Mary Jean Collins is. Collins and three of her fellow activists, Judith Arcana, Heather Booth, and Vivian Rothstein, will join Dore and producer Elizabeth Dreihaus for a Q&A after Friday night’s screening.

“We were practical,” added Arcana, who worked for the Jane Collective and taught in the Women’s Liberation School. “We would ask, ‘What do we need?’ And then we would do it.”

(Booth’s story was similar, except the men at a meeting at U. of C. told the women, “Awww, shaddup!”)

The women’s interests were far-ranging, and the film shows many different battles: campaigns for equal pay for equal work, demonstrations for gay rights, protests outside the Miss America pageant, and a catcalling campaign on Wall Street after an article appeared in the New York Times about how commuters liked to grope one particularly well-endowed woman on her way to work. Women did poetry readings and created feminist comic books and established their own presses (one of which was called Shameless Hussy). The Chicago activists in particular fought for better jobs for women.

Still, you kind of have to wonder how something like that could have put a stop to all that energy and talent and intellect and spirit. Of course NOW still goes on, and Collins is still involved, and Arcana, Booth, and Rothstein have continued to work as activists, but the CWLU broke up in 1976. There was nothing like it when I was growing up in the 80s. Instead there was a sense that all the 60s activism had been silly, especially “women’s lib.” Anyway, I could play real sports at school and I could go to college and get a job, and what did I want, to have to share public bathrooms with men? Because that’s what the ERA meant, didn’t it? I was just as angry as women in the 50s and early 60s, I thought, but I had no outlet for my anger except for reading library books and listening to Courtney Love, who I didn’t really like anyway. I blamed that on growing up in the suburbs, but when I got to college, ready to join the women’s group on campus, there was almost no movement to speak of, just the annual Take Back the Night march. I could barely contain my disappointment. What the hell had happened?